Blog | Labored (Artist Commissions)

Anjana Bala

Akademi Artist Commissions recipient, Anjana Bala, shares the creative journey behind her new dance piece, Labored, and and what’s coming next for it.

This work, titled Labored, takes labour as its primary concern, examining what it means to live in a contemporary marketplace that continually pushes us to innovate, commodify ourselves, and market our identities as self-fashioning entrepreneurs. It considers how artistic practice is shaped by economies that privilege productivity and hyper visibility, often at the expense of psychic sustainability, while masking the various histories and traditions that each of us is marked by. 

While growing as a choreographer remained central, the process ultimately prompted a deeper reflection on what kind of leader and facilitator I want to be within the arts. The process raised questions on how one navigates a space in which they are socially, ethically, and artistically responsible- for the work and for those in it.

In practical terms, this meant negotiating how to balance care for those involved in the production – their sometimes conflicting needs, shifting circumstances, changes in plans, unexpected costs, different working styles, and unforeseen emergencies – with what the work itself demanded, and what I wanted from the work. I found myself confronting the reality that direction often involves disappointing others, making decisions that cannot satisfy every need, overextending oneself, and asking others to overextend themselves – all conditions which are in direct conflict with some of my core values. 

These questions extend to the ethics of labour itself: how do we reconcile the imperative to ensure fair pay, facilitate caring working conditions, and respect time and energy, with the very real constraints of structural and institutional limitations? How do we balance decentralised, collaborative decision-making with clear credit and accountability? And perhaps most pressing, how does one participate in these precarious systems without internalising their failures as their own personal shortcomings?

Given the conditions of the world we live in – conditions we are literally born into without choice: capitalism, colonialism, globalization, racism, austerity, the list is endless – it is often impossible to make purely ethical decisions. If we care about ethics and politics, we may inevitably find ourselves in positions of contradiction, even hypocrisy, doing the very things we once critiqued in others. Ultimately, this work will be made, and I hope to continue making work; what continues to trouble me is how to create art in a world where fully ethical action is impossible, and where art itself may deepen the mess.